(urth) Short Story 20: Morning-Glory

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Mon, 4/23/12, António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Short Story 20: Morning-Glory
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Monday, April 23, 2012, 3:46 PM
> You got a lot more out of this story
> than I thought could be there, Marc. Thanks. 

Glad you enjoyed it.

The radiation in the story is responsible for the natural cycle being disrupted, and the superpowers with the nuclear weapons are overtly mentioned, as well as the diplomat's family in Germany from the conflict that necessitated nuclear proliferation. I think in this story the false man-made nuclear sun that disrupts the turtles mating and prevents the morning glory from blooming has symbolically replaced the real sun - and this analogy runs through the story - the turtles shells being only homes for birds just as the colleges originally designed for religion now concerned with only research and the academic machine, man-made knowledge - no one can see the true sun, and the morning glory never blooms trapped in its marble maze, for in the modern world it has lost the ability to discern where the sunlight really is.